This ^^ is the new cover of the New York Times’ T Style Magazine. That’s Kanye West. The NYT reporter followed him around in New York while he and Kim were in town for NY Fashion Week, which is when Kanye debuted his collection with Adidas. The piece is both “classic Kanye” and “new Kanye.” That’s the thing about interviewing Kanye in a long-form piece. You actually get into his rhythms and you can tell that half the crazy stuff he says comes from a place of humor and self-awareness. He’s a narcissistic douchebag but he knows he’s a narcissistic douchebag and he tries to bring some soul to it. Anyway, because it’s Friday and I had the time, I read the whole piece and I actually enjoyed it. Some highlights:

Kanye on his arrival in the fashion world: “It’s literally like . . . I know this is really harsh, but it’s like Before Yeezy and After Yeezy. This is the new Rome!”

Kanye wants to do for fashion what he did for music: “Before the Internet, music was really expensive. People would use a rack of CDs to show class, to show they had made it. Right now, people use clothes to telegraph that. I want to destroy that. The very thing that supposedly made me special — the jacket that no one could get, the direct communications with the designers — I want to give that to the world.”

His luxury clothes: “There’s a transition. I need to partake in what’s of value and of quality and soul in order to understand it, in order to give it back.”

His dream: “I dreamed, since I was a little kid, of having my own store where I could curate every shoe, sweatshirt and color. I have sketches of it. I cried over the idea of having my own store.”

He’s not a celebrity: “I’m not a celebrity, I’m an activist. The fact that when I see truth it’s really hard for me to sit back and just allow it to happen in front of me on my clock makes me, a lot of times, a bad celebrity.”

His family: “I feel like now I have an amazing wife, a supersmart child and the opportunity to create in two major fields. Before I had those outlets, my ego was all I had.” But he also speaks “all the time” to a doctor who specializes in anger management therapy.

Kanye’s parable: “I have this table in my new house. They put this table in without asking. It was some weird nouveau riche marble table, and I hated it. But it was literally so heavy that it took a crane to move it. We would try to set up different things around it, but it never really worked. I realized that table was my ego. No matter what you put around it, under it, no matter who photographed it, the douchebaggery would always come through.”

The criticism that he’s too heavily influenced by other designers: “I would like to be influenced as much as possible. I don’t care if you can see the influence in something, as long as I made it better.”

Being touched on the cheek by Ralph Lauren: “Do you know what he said when he did that? ‘This is my son.’ And I was thinking, ‘I knew it! I knew Ralph was my daddy!’ ”

[From T Style Magazine]

In one of the more touching moments in the article, Kanye takes a break from fashion shows to stop in a kids’ store, where he carefully picks out several stuffed animals for North, then spends a lot of time looking through kids’ clothing to pick out one sweater for North and one toddler-sized jumper “for reference” for himself. It’s sweet because even though ‘Ye is narcissism-monster, it just shows that at the purest level, he really does flat-out adore his daughter and fatherhood.

Oh, and I LOVE his parable about the table. Dude used “douchebaggery” in a NYT profile. Classy.

Cover courtesy of T Style Magazine, additional photos courtesy of WENN, Fame/Flynet.